The turn to postcolonial approaches, inaugurated
by Peter Hulme, Ania Loomba, and others in the late 1980s and early
1990s, has hugely invigorated the field of English Renaissance
drama, giving us an increasingly complex picture of the role that
the theater played as England, and later Great Britain, embarked on
its commercial and imperial expansion. The interest in England’s
relations with the lands and peoples that lay beyond its borders
has led to a range of fascinating work on race, empire, and
economics, among other topics.1

After a brief excursus to the New World, exemplified by the
signal work of Peter Hulme and of Stephen Greenblatt on The
Tempest, the field has focused on the representation of
Mediterranean exchanges on the early modern
stage.2 In particular, critics have explored how
the theater managed the threat of religious difference and the
seductiveness of the Muslim world.3 These studies
have offered important correctives to the bald “application” of
Said’s Orientalism to the early modern Mediterranean,
focusing on the discrepancies between England’s lack of power in
the period and its imaginative responses to that lack. The theater
thus appears as a key space for compensatory fantasies, in which
England functioned as the center of power and the cultural norm.
Moreover, given its inherent performativity, the stage served to
investigate the malleability of identity when faced with the
possibility of conversion, the dreaded and yet enticing moment of
“turning Turk.” Conversely, the dramatic resistance to such
enticements could serve to stage a core of Englishness around which
to consolidate a national identity. The recent work of such critics
as Benedict Robinson, Valerie Forman, Cyrus Mulready, and Jane
Degenhardt profitably explores how dramatic form refracts the
complexities of an expanding world, one in which England was often
all too aware of its marginality.4 By introducing
such neglected genres as the romance (in its larger,
non-Shakespearean sense) and the tragicomedy into the discussion,
these critics combine the study of form with a finely grained
historicism.

The postcolonial paradigm has also served to interrogate the
category of the nation as it is abundantly rehearsed on the early
modern stage. The national is no longer a given: instead, critics
have stressed the constructedness of both England and English,
exploring the representation of the “archipelagic” elements that
made up Great Britain, the often vexed development of the English
language, and the effort required to distinguish England from both
imperial models and rivals.5 The recuperation of
England’s early experience of empire in Ireland, with all its
attendant violence, has been particularly important in this regard,
going well beyond English drama to offer new readings of Spenser
and of Gaelic texts and culture.6

Yet despite these geographic and conceptual expansions, the
field of early modern drama as a whole has remained strikingly
monolingual, steadfastly focused on English texts. It may be that
our national preoccupations endure precisely because the field has
expanded so much in other dimensions: scholars who must master a
variety of discourses, complex historical contexts, and a whole
range of specialized knowledges in order to produce the
historicist, cultural-studies work that is now standard in the
field may find it challenging also to familiarize themselves with
literature in other contemporary traditions. There is also, as
Jonathan Burton and Walter Cohen have both pointed out, a
reluctance on the part of critics to use translations when they do
not have the linguistic skills to access texts in the
original.7 The unfortunate result of this
reticence is a continued focus on English-language texts, even when
critics themselves recognize that the problems they are tackling
would be better addressed by considering a wider corpus. We are
always surprised anew by the cosmopolitanism of early modern texts
and subjects, no matter how many times we have encountered it; only
a broader critical scope, similarly unfettered by national
boundaries, can truly do it justice.

Yet national habits die hard. Scholars trained to consider
literature as a national phenomenon or to study an English-language
heritage are unlikely to look further afield. In particular, the
unabated pressure for graduate students to prove their mettle in
the field by tackling...

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